In today’s Critical Conditions podcast, Claire and I focused on Africa — again in convulsion. Two flashpoints, Sudan and Nigeria, with 300 million people between them, illustrate the unpromising direction of travel. But there’s so much more.
Nigeria is suddenly the object of Trump’s erratic attention. Out of nowhere, he threatened “decisive military action” unless Abuja stops the massacre of Christians by Islamist gunmen. He announced plans to cut aid and even hinted at “boots on the ground.” From what we can tell, it was a case of the US president threatening a basically democratic ally because it pleased his evangelical base. We suspect he may not know the Christian victims of Boko Haram are not white.
Nigeria’s government, led by President Bola Tinubu, responded with boilerplate assurances about religious freedom. The reality, as we noted, is more complex. Boko Haram and its splinter groups have ravaged the northeast for years, killing Muslims and Christians alike. In the country’s center, Christian farmers and Muslim herders battle over land made barren by climate change.
The Nigerian state has indeed failed to contain the chaos, but Washington’s moral posturing rings hollow. For Americans, the imagery of murdered Christians merely resonates with white-evangelical mythology and is part of the domestic cultural wars. We do not believe Trump cares about Nigeria, except maybe for oil.
For Nigerians, all this recalls a colonial reflex — that African lives merit outrage only when Western religion (yes, yes, it hails from the Holy Land) is involved. I know well the Western audience’s indifference to Africa. I covered it for years as AP’s regional editor. The violence is relentless, claiming thousands of lives annually. The attention from the world is sporadic at best.
Across the continent’s eastern rim lies Sudan, where a civil war that began in April 2023 between the national army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has metastasized into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. What started as a duel between rival generals has become an ethnic purge in Darfur and a famine stretching across half the country. The RSF — descendants of the Janjaweed militias of the early-2000s genocide — has captured El Fasher and other cities through scorched-earth tactics: hospitals bombed, food aid looted, civilians executed. The United Nations speaks of “mass atrocities”; the WHO warns that cholera and starvation may soon kill more than bullets.
Diplomacy has failed because there is barely a state left to negotiate with. Egypt and the Gulf monarchies back one side, Wagner-linked Russian networks the other. The United States and Europe express outrage in vain (it’s nice to see anything still outrage the Trump US). Millions are displaced, exporting instability to Chad, South Sudan, and the Red Sea corridor. Sudan is a parable of modern collapse: private armies funded by smuggling, civilians abandoned, global attention fixated elsewhere. Expect trouble.
This barely registers on UE and European nightly news. There are no campus protests, no viral hashtags, no “Save Darfur” revival. The last man standing in the Western press is Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, who has made a major effort to draw attention. He has shown that it’s not just apathy about the wars: thousands are dying because of the trashing of food and medical programs as Trump’s people killed USAID on a manufactured premise of fighting wokeness.
In Tanzania, the ruling party just “won” an election with 97 percent of the vote. Opposition leaders were barred or beaten; hundreds have died in protests. One-party dominance is a pattern across the continent. The United States, stripped of moral suasion on account of its own authoritarian government, can say little. Europe, shackled by colonial guilt, barely tries.
And yet self-interest alone should impel engagement. The Red Sea corridor that borders Sudan is a vital artery of world trade; Nigeria’s oil and gas feed Europe’s energy balance. Every refugee flow, every jihadist cell, every shipping disruption radiates outward. What happens in El Fasher or Kaduna will not stay there. The collapse of the world’s youngest continent will reverberate through the entire international system.
